Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, “Now look here. We’ve fussed long enough. We got to put your stuff on the market,” then Gottlieb answered, “No. If you wait till I have done all I can⁠—maybe one year, probably three⁠—you shall have it. But not till I am sure. No.”

Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.

Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.

Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freest organization for pure scientific research in the country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spend eternity in happy and thoroughly impractical research, he would have devised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its director should have called on him.

Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an earnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.

“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to have an introduction to you.”

Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.

Tubbs looked at the assistants; like a plotter in a political play, and hinted, “May we have a talk⁠—”

Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of sidetracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:

“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on the eve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you left academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wished that you had cared to come to us.”

“You would have taken me in? I needn’t at all have come here?”

“Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving your attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether you could be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train and ran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of the institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. You would, of course, have absolute freedom as to what researches you thought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as good assistance and material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In regard to salary⁠—permit me to be businesslike and perhaps blunt, as my train leaves in one hour⁠—I don’t suppose we could equal the doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but we can go to ten thousand dollars a year⁠—”

“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you in New York one week from today. You see,” said Gottlieb, “I haf no contract here!”

All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.

Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man’s country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!”

From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

“If you’re going driving, don’t forget that supper is six o’clock sharp,” Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugarcoat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, “Be back by six. Supper at six o’clock sharp.”

Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, “Say, you folks better not forget to be back at six o’clock for supper or the Old Man’ll have a fit. He’ll expect you for supper at six o’clock sharp, and when he says six o’clock sharp, he means six o’clock sharp, and not five minutes past six!”

“Now that,” observed Leora, “is funny, because in my twenty-two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as late as seven minutes after six. Let’s get out of this, Sandy⁠ ⁠… I wonder were we so wise to live with the family and save money?”

Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing: “Better be home by six.”

Martin would be heroic. “We’ll by golly get back when we’re by golly good and ready!” he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy prospect was the order, “Be back at six sharp”; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer was returning from the creamery, full thirty seconds later than usual.

“Glad to see you among us,” he said. “Hustle now and get that horse in the livery stable. Supper’s at six⁠—sharp!”

Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced at the supper-table:

“We had a bully drive. I’m going to like it here. Well, I’ve loafed for a day and a half, and now I’ve got to get busy. First thing is, I must find a location for my office. What is there vacant, Father Tozer?”

Mrs. Tozer said brightly, “Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin. Why can’t we fix up an office for